living, learning, playing, wondering and pondering at Playcentre

Main menu

Category Archives: Documentation

Writing stories about children’s learning is a powerful way to to build an image of that child’s learner identity. To honour the complexity of children learning, these prompts can help to look beyond knowledge and skills to notice the wonderful intricacies of our children’s learning.

One purpose of documenting children’s learning is to be able to capture the progress in children learning. The word progress can be defined as ‘the forward or onward movement toward a destination’. So with that definition in mind we have to think about what is the destination we are moving towards?

Te Whāriki aspiration provides us with that destination

” … that all children will grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging, secure in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society.”

Te Whāriki also provides us with the desired outcomes for our children

Mana atua = I have power over myself. I know my own strengths. I value my whakapapa.

Mana reo = I share my views. I ask for what I need. I express my ideas.

Mana auturoa = I explore the bigger world.

Mana tangata I take care of others. I take leadership.

Mana whenua = This place is my turangawaewae. I join in.

Margaret Carr developed a notion of progress here as the ABCD framework – where the measure of progress involves four key elements – agency, breadth, continuity and distribution.

We can also think of progress in terms of learner identity and dispositions. We know children make progress when they

Stick at it longer

Become more adventurous with it

Master it

Become an expert in it

Teach it to others

Learning stories provide us a powerful tool to capture this learning. A learning story generally captures a moment in time to illustrate the child’s learning. A learning story can also capture a child’s learning over a longer period of time – this will provide a holistic picture of the child as a learner. Below are three examples of what that might look like.

In Playcentre the end of session korero is pounamu. It’s a time to stop and reflect, to connect, to share stories and to learn from each other. When thinking about documenting it, it’s a good idea to think about the purpose of the documentation. Why are you documenting this? What do you do with the information you documented? How are you going to use this information to do things differently for your tamariki?

When we document children’s learning we want it to be more like storytelling and less like paperwork. We want it to be about the children rather than complying with requirements.

There is no right or wrong way of documenting the end of session korero. Try different things. Keep what you like and tweak what is not working. A key outcome of documenting the end of session korero is to capture the emergent play and learning interests.

This end of session is designed to focus on capturing emergent interests.

Good questions will help you to generate powerful conversations at the end of session.

Capturing the emergent interests on session helps us to make decisions about the next session.

See below examples of how centres document the emergent interests of the children’s play and learning.